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The Endogenous Grid Method for Discrete-Continuous Dynamic Choice Models with (Or Without) Taste Shocks

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The Endogenous Grid Method for Discrete-Continuous Dynamic Choice Models with (Or Without) Taste Shocks A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Iskhakov, Fedor; Jørgensen, Thomas Høgholm; Rust, John; Schjerning, Bertel Article The endogenous grid method for discrete-continuous dynamic choice models with (or without) taste shocks Quantitative Economics Provided in Cooperation with: The Econometric Society Suggested Citation: Iskhakov, Fedor; Jørgensen, Thomas Høgholm; Rust, John; Schjerning, Bertel (2017) : The endogenous grid method for discrete-continuous dynamic choice models with (or without) taste shocks, Quantitative Economics, ISSN 1759-7331, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 8, Iss. 2, pp. 317-365, http://dx.doi.org/10.3982/QE643 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/195542 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ www.econstor.eu Quantitative Economics 8 (2017), 317–365 1759-7331/20170317 The endogenous grid method for discrete-continuous dynamic choice models with (or without) taste shocks Fedor Iskhakov Research School of Economics, Australian National University and ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, University of New South Wales Thomas H. Jørgensen Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen John Rust Department of Economics, Georgetown University Bertel Schjerning Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen We present a fast and accurate computational method for solving and estimating a class of dynamic programming models with discrete and continuous choice vari- ables. The solution method we develop for structural estimation extends the en- dogenous grid-point method (EGM) to discrete-continuous (DC) problems. Dis- crete choices can lead to kinks in the value functions and discontinuities in the optimal policy rules, greatly complicating the solution of the model. We show how these problems are ameliorated in the presence of additive choice-specific independent and identically distributed extreme value taste shocks that are typi- cally interpreted as “unobserved state variables” in structural econometric appli- cations, or serve as “random noise” to smooth out kinks in the value functions in numerical applications. We present Monte Carlo experiments that demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of the DC-EGM algorithm and the associated maxi- mum likelihood estimator for structural estimation of a life-cycle model of con- sumption with discrete retirement decisions. Fedor Iskhakov: [email protected] Thomas H. Jørgensen: [email protected] John Rust: [email protected] Bertel Schjerning: [email protected] We acknowledge helpful comments from Chris Carroll, Giulio Fella and many other people, participants at seminars at University of New South Wales, University of Copenhagen, the 2012 conferences of the Society of Economic Dynamics, the Society for Computational Economics, and the Initiative for Computational Economics at Zurich (ZICE 2014, 2015, 2017). This paper is part of the Intelligent road user charging (IRUC) research project financed by the Danish Council for Strategic Research (DSF). Iskhakov, Rust, and Schjern- ing gratefully acknowledge this support. Iskhakov gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (project CE110001029) and Michael P.Keane’s Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (project FL110100247). Jørgensen gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Danish Council for Independent Research in Social Sci- ences (FSE, Grant 4091-00040). Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Quantitative Economics. The Econometric Society. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0. Available at http://www.qeconomics.org. DOI: 10.3982/QE643 318 Iskhakov, Jørgensen, Rust, and Schjerning Quantitative Economics 8 (2017) Keywords. Life-cycle model, discrete and continuous choice, Bellman equation, Euler equation, retirement choice, endogenous grid-point method, nested fixed point algorithm, extreme value taste shocks, smoothed max function, structural estimation. JEL classification. C13, C63, D91. 1. Introduction This paper develops a fast new solution algorithm for structural estimation of dynamic programming models with discrete and continuous choices. The algorithm we propose extends the endogenous grid method (EGM) by Carroll (2006) to discrete-continuous (DC) models. We refer to it as the DC-EGM algorithm. We embed the DC-EGM algo- rithm in the inner loop of the nested fixed point (NFXP) algorithm (Rust (1987)), and show that the resulting maximum likelihood estimator produces accurate estimates of the structural parameters at low computational cost. There is an extensive literature on static models of discrete/continuous choice: a classic example is Dubin and McFadden (1984). However, the focus of our paper is on dynamic DC models. A classic example is the life-cycle model with discrete retire- ment and continuous consumption decisions. While there is a well developed literature on solution and estimation of dynamic discrete choice models, and a separate literature on estimation of life-cycle models without discrete choices, there has been far less work on solution and estimation of DC models.1 There is good reason why DC models are much less commonly seen in the literature: they are substantially harder to solve. The value functions of models with only continu- ous choices are typically concave and the optimal policy function can be found from the Euler equation. EGM avoids the need to numerically solve the nonlinear Euler equation for the optimal continuous choice at each grid point in the state space. Instead, EGM specifies an exogenous grid over an endogenous quantity (e.g., savings) to analytically calculate the optimal policy rule (e.g., consumption) and endogenously determine the predecision state (e.g., beginning-of-period resources).2 DC-EGM retains the main de- sirable properties of EGM, namely it avoids the bulk of costly root-finding operations and handles borrowing constraints in an efficient manner. Dynamic programs that have only discrete choices are substantially easier to solve, since the optimal decision rule is simply the alternative with the highest choice-specific 1There are relatively few examples of structural estimation or numerical solution of DC models. Some prominent examples include the model of optimal nondurable consumption and housing purchases (Carroll and Dunn (1997)), optimal saving and retirement (French and Jones (2011)), and optimal saving, labor supply, and fertility (Adda, Dustmann, and Stevens (2017)). 2The EGM is in fact a specific application of what is referred to as “controlling the postdecision state” in operations research and engineering (Bertsekas, Lee, van Roy, and Tsitsiklis (1997)). Carroll (2006)in- troduced the idea in economics by developing the EGM algorithm with the application to the buffer-stock precautionary savings model. Since then the idea became widespread in economics. Further generaliza- tions of EGM include Barillas and Fernández-Villaverde (2007), Hintermaier and Koeniger (2010), Ludwig and Schön (2013), Fella (2014), Iskhakov (2015). Jørgensen (2013) compares the performance of EGM to mathematical programming with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). Quantitative Economics 8 (2017) DC-EGM method for dynamic choice models 319 value. However, solving dynamic programming problems that combine continuous and discrete choices is substantially more complicated, since discrete choices introduce kinks and nonconcave regions in the value function that lead to discontinuities in the policy function of the continuous choice (consumption). This can lead to situations where the Euler equation has multiple solutions for consumption, and hence it is only a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for the optimal consumption rule (Clausen and Strub (2013)). This inherent feature of DC problems complicates any method one might consider for solving DC models. We illustrate how DC-EGM can deal with these inherent complications using a life- cycle model with a continuous consumption and binary retirement choice with and without taste shocks. Our example is a simple extension of the classic life-cycle model of Phelps (1962) where, in the absence of a retirement decision, the optimal consump- tion rule could hardly be any simpler—a linear function of resources. However, once the discrete retirement decision is added to
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